On any given Monday, Gilroy firefighter Andy Holiday might be
fending off flames or wheeling ailing patients into ambulances; on
alternating Tuesdays, he ducks underwater at the Monterey Bay
Aquarium, into an alien world few others see.
Gilroy – On any given Monday, Gilroy firefighter Andy Holiday might be fending off flames or wheeling ailing patients into ambulances; on alternating Tuesdays, he ducks underwater at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, into an alien world few others see. Wednesday you might find him on his motorcycle, tearing down a South County highway; Thursday he surfs the Web, planning his next jaunt to Africa or the South Pacific, or a whitewater rafting trip with his four kids and his girlfriend, emergency dispatcher Cheri Carreiro. Throughout his 33 years with the Gilroy Fire Department, friends have come to ask, “Where have you been lately?”
A life like Holiday’s doesn’t happen by accident.
“Life is a series of adventures, and you have to plan for them,” said Holiday, sipping a hot chocolate outside the First Street Starbucks. (Caffeine is one of the few risks he shuns.) “Most people don’t do what they want to do because they don’t plan it.”
Holiday, 54, calls them “calculated risks”: Scuba-diving. Swift-water rescue. Firefighting itself. On a dry-erase board at home, he lists his dreams on a to-do list – and he does them. In the early ’90s, he read a newspaper article about a Morgan Hill scuba-diver, and thought, “That’s cool,” as many readers might. But Holiday added it to his to-do list, and by 1992 he was a certified diver, volunteering in Monterey Bay.
At the aquarium’s kelp forest exhibit, kids pack the amphitheater and cluster around the stairwells, eyes agog with the dive tank’s eerie underwater glow, and watch Holiday descend among frothy columns of amber kelp. A sheepshead fish snaps at a clump of squid, falling from his hand; leopard sharks circle him, inspiring cries from the kids. Holiday chuckles.
“Aren’t these dangerous fish? I’m so afraid of them,” he jokes. “Here I am feeding these man-eating sharks and you guys don’t even applaud!”
Dutifully, the kids clap and cheer as Holiday pulls clam meat from a bucket. Another fish noses into the feed bag, trying to cut out the middleman. The crowd giggles, as Holiday tells them there’s nothing to fear.
“If you walked out into the forest, would you be scared?” Holiday asks them. “Or out into the desert?”
If you’re Andy Holiday, the answer is no. He’s eaten beetles and slept in the jungles of Belize; he’s lunched with tribal chiefs in Gilroy’s sister city Palau. “They’re really great people,” Holiday said offhandedly. Adventures are one thing, he adds, but it’s the people that make them worth it. After his dive show, Holiday surfaces from the tank into a dull world of concrete and tile, unmasks himself and chats with the spectators gathered at its rim, from California kids to foreign tourists. A shy grade-schooler, DJ, reaches out to touch his wet suit: a quarter-inch of neoprene rubber that insulates him from the bracing 50-degree water.
“This is what I really love,” he said, watching DJ walk away. “I get to talk to people.”
It’s what he loves about firefighting too, he said. In his 36-year career, he’s had opportunities to advance to the big city, to quit Gilroy for larger departments. Holiday never wanted to. In this town, he’s often rescuing friends or friends of friends; on calls, he recognizes Gilroyans he helped deliver as babies. On 24-hour shifts, he’s spent a third of his life with fellow firefighters, coworkers who feel more like family. Even on the difficult calls – a medical call that ended in a man’s death, for example – Holiday’s relationships have shaped losses into something meaningful. When that man died, his wife told Holiday, “Andy, I’m glad you’re here.”
“You put the things that are devastating off to the side,” Holiday said, “and you focus on the things that really touch people … She knew we worked our hearts off, trying to save this guy.”
Over the years, his to-do list has dwindled, one dream at a time. But there are still plenty of adventures in store: Between calls at Las Animas Fire Station, Holiday surfs the Web for tours of east Africa, excited by the prospect of safaris and village markets. Mount Rushmore is still on his list, and so is New York City. Holiday even auditioned for the reality show “Survivor.” He wasn’t picked, but he’s hoping he and Carreiro might make it onto “The Amazing Race,” a team-based reality show.
“I get to go out and see a world that most people don’t see,” Holiday said, grinning. With a life like that, there’s only a few bigger dreams: “The next best thing would be going into space.”
